Sunday, January 22, 2006

Crooked Timber has a pair of extendedexcerpts from Andrew Krepinevich's The Army and Vietnam. This one is quite popular at my grad school. Krepinevich argues that the Army never really fought a counterinsurgency battle but instead tried to fight the war it was designed to fight, a large conventional war. Despite an understanding of what was happening, the Army did not change its behavior and did not change the field manuals afterwards. The obvious comparison is to the Iraq war army and its focus on large scale combat rather than insurgency.

Amazon handily pairs the book with Harry Summer's On Strategy. Summers disagrees entirely. He argues that after Tet the war had shifted from an insurgency conflict and towards a conventional war, which the NVA won, as the Army was spending too much effort on counter-insurgency operations! The somewhat controversial A Better War argues that US military performance in the last few years was more impressive than is commonly thought. This doesn't necessarily validate the "stab-in-the-back" perspective, but it does mean that those military operations may hold lessons for today.

Too many people focus on the political aspects of Vietnam, when it is the policy questions that are more relevant today. How can a major conventional army reorient to conduct counterinsurgency operations? How does the Iraqi insurgency compare to the VC? How can the US reframe the conflict to limit its weaknesses and emphasize its strengths? Books like the ones above can at least provide a starting point for discussion.